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Fired up machine yesterday and while the guest account is working fine the user account is not. The side bar is gone and the I cannot fire up a terminal via ctrl+alt+t. I can access the virtual consoles (alt+F1-F6).

I'm not sure what caused this. The machine shut down fine and the I haven't updated anything. To rectify the problem I've tried: 

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get update

I've also tried

sudo service lightdm restart
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install unity

Also tried several of the solutions on here:

Unity doesn't load, no Launcher, no Dash appears Nothings work so far and I think the best thing I can do is transfer the data to one of my other Ubuntu machines (*unless anyone has another suggestion). I have a project on the go and it hasn't been backed up in the past week and I don't want to lose the data. I've tried to ssh from the second machine, but keep getting this:

ssh: connect to host XXX.XXX.X.XXX  port 22: Network is unreachable

Any idea how I can retrieve the data??

Edit: So it appear that some of my data is missing?! I haven't rm any of it though I did follow one instruction that rm /.config and attempted to reinstall it. I cannot access Document or Pictures for example, an error comes up: "Underhanded error message: Error when getting information for file '/home//Pictures': no such file or directory" - can this be recovered?!

Community
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user2350366
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  • I can't help you with the data you already have. That you will need to transfer manually. On my machine I avoid your situation up front. I defined a partition for Linux, the "/" partition and the /home partition for all of my data. I have run into problems in the past in which case I simply formatted the "/" partition and brought up Linux again. Not a single byte in /home was touched and since that is my data, it is much more important to me than Linux programs. – Ilan Nov 18 '16 at 16:56

2 Answers2

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Seeing you have other machines, I would try to install Ubuntu onto a external hard drive and then boot the problem machine with it. If it sees your data, you can just copy what you want to the new hard drive, make sure it is big enough.

crip659
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This might not fix your problem, but it could be worth a try. You will need to create a user that can use sudo. See this guide

This did the trick for me on a similar problem.

Backup your home

sudo cp -rp /home/<user> /home/<user>.backup

Remove your home folder:

sudo rm -rf /home/<user>

Recreate your home directory:

mkhomedir_helper <user>

Then try logging in and see if it is working. If it is, you can get what you need out of the .backup folder and carry on.

Dan
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